Head coach urges parents to ‘write an excuse for school’ so kids can see his team’s World Cup last-16 game against Mexico

Harry Kane came to England’s rescue as they avoided a seismic World Cup upset against the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to set up a last-16 tie against co-hosts Mexico next week.

The Bayern Munich striker scored twice in the last 15 minutes to save manager Thomas Tuchel’s blushes after Brian Cipenga had given the African side a shock early lead. It was the first time that England have won a game at the World Cup after conceding the first goal since beating West Germany in the 1966 final at Wembley.

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Yorgen Fenech, heir to property empire, on trial for alleged involvement in murder of journalist, which he denies

One of Malta’s wealthiest businessmen plotted to kill the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, paying €150,000 (£130,000) for three hitmen to carry out the murder, a jury has heard.

Yorgen Fenech, the 44-year-old heir to a property empire that includes the Hilton Malta hotel and casino, is on trial for the 2017 murder.

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Anthropic has released the latest version of its mid-sized model, Sonnet 5, which the company claims is its most “agentic” yet. For developers writing agents to automate tedious and recurring tasks, Sonnet 5 promises improved capabilities in reasoning, tool use, coding, and knowledge work. This version is also less likely to pull embarrassing (for Anthropic) gaffes of misunderstanding, so the company asserts. “Our safety assessments found that Sonnet 5 shows an overall lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6, and is generally safer to use in agentic contexts,” the company asserted in an introductory blog post on Tuesday. Sonnet 5 is smarter at refusing malicious requests and resisting prompt-injection attempts. It doesn’t hallucinate as often and doesn’t suck up to the user so much (“sycophancy”) as did its older brown-nosing Sonnet 4.6 sibling. It is also more aware of, and can block, user misuse and deception, the benchmarks in Anthropic’s System Card seem to indicate. Sonnet is the default model for Claude Free and Pro users, and is also available to the token-pinching Max, Team, and Enterprise customers. The benchmarks also indicate Sonnet 5’s performance can come close to that of Anthropic’s flagship enterprise-focused Opus 4.8, but can execute the same tasks more cost effectively. For Opus, Anthropic charges $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Starting in September, Sonnet users will pay $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, though Anthropic is running a special through the end of August where tokens will only be $2 per million inputs and $10 per million outputs. So users trimming their token budgets can run jobs through Sonnet instead of Opus, the company suggests. The 5.0 release offers a new setting to adjust the model’s effort at completing tasks. Simple tasks can be completed through one of the lower “effort” settings, which uses fewer tokens, while longer-running agent-based tasks can go full throttle (“xhigh” or even Homer Simpson’s favorite setting, “max”). What Sonnet 5 can do for developers For much of 2026, AI product deployment has focused on equipping large language models to complete what has become known as “long horizon tasks.” It might be easy for a model to fix a bug or churn out some code. However, keeping its finicky attention fixed on a multi-part task has proven more difficult. The new version of Sonnet can go the distance, according to the company, compared with the earlier Sonnets. “Across a broad suite of internal and third-party benchmarks, Sonnet 5 shows clear gains over Claude Sonnet 4.6 in coding, agentic search, multimodal reasoning, and professional-task performance,” the System Card asserted. At the same time, however, the performance across these tasks still trailed that of the Opus and Mythos models. One testimonial from a Zapier engineer described a two-part job that flummoxed earlier Sonnets: Update a contact database and send out a notice to all users. Version 5 was able to complete the task “end to end.” Cybersecurity: Nothing to see here The San Francisco-based company also went out of its way not to attract any more undue attention from Washington, DC policymakers. “We did not deliberately train Sonnet 5 on cybersecurity tasks,” the company asserted. In June, the US Commerce Department, citing national security concerns, slapped Anthropic with an export control directive temporarily restricting foreign access to the newly released Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models. Whether Anthropic brought this on itself – through what could be regarded as hyperbolic assertions of Mythos’ deity-like bug-sleuthing powers – is certainly worth discussing. But Anthropic, like Pete Townshend, certainly won’t be fooled again. While it can readily perform routine cybersecurity tasks, Sonnet 5 is guardrailed against generating offensive attack code. When commanded to write a Firefox exploit, it failed to complete the task (though it got a bit further than Sonnet 4.6 in the attempt). “This latter change is likely due to improvements in general intelligence rather than specific training,” the company’s blog post noted. ®

Anthropic says that it plans to remove hidden codes it added to Claude Code several months ago to catch other AI companies that are trying to steal from its models. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code team, said on Tuesday that a fix should appear on July 1. "This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation," Shihipar explained, using the industry term for copying AI models through repeated queries. "The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while." He said that the pull request to remove the code has been merged and should appear in Wednesday's Claude Code release. The experiment, as described by a developer who goes by the name Thereallo, consisted of applying steganography – hiding secret data in plain sight – to the Claude Code system context that gets passed to Anthropic's servers. The relevant code checks Claude Code's base URL environment variable, used to route API requests to a proxy or gateway. If the base URL has been overridden, the code goes on to check the system timezone and whether the hostname matches any entry in a list of known Chinese AI labs, other AI companies, account resellers, and gateway domains. Thereallo said that while it makes sense that Anthropic might try to detect a hostname associated with a Chinese AI rival or a reseller, the implementation should not have been concealed. "[Claude Code] silently alters the system prompt using invisible-ish Unicode markers," Thereallo wrote. "It encodes proxy / gateway classification into a sentence that looks like plain English. It hides the domain list behind XOR and base64. This is not a malicious feature, but it is a weird choice for a developer tool that asks for trust." Asked whether Anthropic disclosed its covert usage tracking mechanism in any of its terms of service documents, a company spokesperson pointed to Shihipar's remarks, which did not address that question. Nor did Anthropic's spokesperson immediately respond to a request to specify what "stronger mitigations" have been implemented to prevent unauthorized resellers and distillation. In February, shortly before the implementation of the steganographic codes, the AI biz said that it was investing in defenses against distillation. These included detection via classifiers and behavioral fingerprinting systems, intelligence sharing with other AI labs, access controls, and countermeasures that make it harder to use model output to reproduce the model. One such defense came to light when the company's Claude Code source leaked. The coding agent includes a Typescript file with a flag called ANTI_DISTILLATION_CC. The flag, when set, injects fake tool data into API requests in an attempt to make that data toxic for model training. Even with its technical defenses against competition, Anthropic urged the AI industry, cloud providers, and government to respond to the threat of model distillation. A recent White House Executive Order that articulates the intent to protect US AI from foreign adversaries shows that the feds have some interest in answering that call. ®

Vibe coders apparently don't understand what their AI servants write - at least that’s what the team behind open-source game engine Godot seems to be implying with a new policy that cracks down on AI-generated contributions. The Godot team announced on Tuesday that they were in the process of rewriting their contribution policy to prohibit almost all use of AI from contributors, citing an overwhelming number of pull requests that have poured in, many of which appear to be AI-generated. Nor, the maintainers suggested, can many heavy AI users be relied on to respond meaningfully to review feedback. “AI cannot take responsibility, and we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it,” the Godot maintainers said in their announcement. Ouch. The maintainers described AI pull requests as “demoralizing” for the Godot team, echoing comments made earlier this year when maintainer Rémi Verschelde said AI pull requests were increasingly draining and demoralizing wastes of time. AI PRs, one game studio that uses Godot noted earlier this year, are largely garbage, come from users who don’t understand what they’re proposing, and are largely “a total shitshow.” The Godot team said that it now recognizes the problem isn’t going away, so it’s time to do something about it. “Accordingly, we are in the process of updating our contribution policies, including adding a stricter policy on AI contributions,” they said. For starters, new contributors (defined as anyone with three or fewer merged pull requests) will be required to get explicit permission from maintainers if they want to submit new features or significant refactoring to Godot's codebase. This, the team said, is a bid to exclude vibe coders and AI agents and nurture a group of contributors who understand the Godot codebase and are willing to communicate with the team to learn more about it. On that note, contribution discussions will be required to remain human-to-human, too: No AI agents or bots clogging up the comms channels, unless they're being used to translate between languages. “We need to ensure that people who choose to review PRs feel their time is well spent,” the Godot maintainers explained. As for AI code itself, any autonomous agent-authored contributions or vibe-coded garbage will continue to result in an auto-ban from the team’s GitHub repo, and the team is extending that ban on AI code to include a prohibition on the use of AI to generate any substantial piece of code. “AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace),” the team explained. “If you do use AI in some capacity to author code, you must disclose it in the PR discussion.” The policy has yet to be formally amended, and the Godot maintainers didn’t say when exactly they’d release the update. Needless to say, vibe coders and AI agents aren’t welcome even now, so don’t push your luck. Vibe coding has shown other signs of falling out of favor lately as horror stories about deleted databases and wiped drives continue to pile up. Just last week, the chairman of IT consulting service Infosys predicted that vibe coding wasn’t something professionals should be worried about as there’s more to writing good software than coding. “Given that AI is a much larger and disruptive technology transition than ever before, the questions are louder and the doubts are more insistent,” Nandan Nilekani said in a speech at the company’s AGM last week. “While we will embrace the best coding tools and improve our productivity, there is much more to do in the software development life cycle.” Context, Nilekani said, is paramount in software development. Based on the vibe-coded disaster that Godot has dealt with, AI doesn’t seem quite capable of grasping that important element. ®

Claus Larsen / Leaether Strip

MHKBB posted a photo:

Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Zeiss Planar T* 2.8/80 C
Film: Ilford XP2 Super
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart

De BBB is in Drenthe uit de coalitie met VVD, PvdA en CDA gestapt. Tijdens een bijna zes uur durend debat over de stikstofplannen van de provincie stemde de BBB tegen het beleid van hun eigen gedeputeerde Henk Emmens.

LONDEN (ANP) - Tennisser Novak Djokovic heeft de derde ronde op Wimbledon bereikt. De 24-voudig grandslamwinnaar versloeg de Griek Stéfanos Tsitsipás met 6-3 6-4 6-2. De Serviër treft in de volgende ronde de Fransman Arthur Rinderknech.

De laatste keer dat Djokovic (39) niet voorbij de tweede ronde op Wimbledon kwam, was in 2008. Vorig jaar verloor de zevenvoudig kampioen in de halve finale van de latere winnaar Jannik Sinner uit Italië.

Djokovic kwam tegen de twaalf jaar jongere Tsitsipás goed voor de dag. De huidige nummer 8 van de wereldranglijst verloor geen enkele keer zijn service. Hij won de eerste set na een enkele break en deed hetzelfde in de tweede set. In de derde set won hij vanaf 2-2 vier games op rij.

AMSTERDAM (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Het Frans-Duitse defensieconcern KNDS stelt zijn beursgang uit. Het bedrijf startte eind vorige maand het traject voor een notering op de beurzen in Parijs en Frankfurt. Maar KNDS meldt woensdag van plan te zijn het proces later pas te zullen hervatten.

Het bedrijf wijst op marktvolatiliteit in de Europese defensiesector. Aandeelhouders zouden hebben laten weten dat ze het proces willen voortzetten op een moment dat de omstandigheden gunstiger zijn.

De stap van KNDS naar de beurs wordt naar verwachting een van de grootste in Europa van de afgelopen jaren. Daarbij zou een waardering aan het concern toegekend worden tussen de 15 miljard en 20 miljard euro.

KNDS bouwt onder meer de Duitse Leopard-tanks, de Franse Leclerc-tanks, artillerie en gevechtsvoertuigen. Het is een van de strategisch belangrijkste defensiebedrijven van Europa.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Landbouw moet mogelijk blijven in de zones rond natuurgebieden waar de stikstofuitstoot harder omlaag moet dan elders. Dat zei minister Jaimi van Essen (Landbouw, D66) in het debat over zijn stikstofmaatregelen. "We vragen in de zones het maximale wat wij verantwoord vinden om landbouwkundig gebruik mogelijk te houden."

Rond veel natuurgebieden komen volgens de kabinetsplannen zones van 500 meter breed, en bij 15 zones is dat een kilometer. Daar moet de stikstofuitstoot gemiddeld 20 procentpunt harder dalen dan in de rest van Nederland, hoewel dat van gebied tot gebied verschilt.

Volgens Van Essen was het ook denkbaar om de stikstofuitstoot in de zones met 85 à 90 procent terug te dringen. "Dat kan, dat is ook een manier om het te doen, maar dan kan je in die zones dus geen landbouw meer bedrijven. Dan kun je daar struiken gaan onderhouden. En dat is iets wat dit kabinet niet wil."

Landelijke ingrepen

Met name ChristenUnie en SGP maakten in het debat bezwaar tegen de combinatie van plaatselijke en landelijke maatregelen. "Van beide is het maximale in het plan gestopt", zei André Flach. "Is dat niet misgegaan?"

Nee, antwoordde Van Essen. Bovenop de regels in de zones zijn volgens hem nog landelijke ingrepen nodig om de stikstofuitstoot genoeg terug te brengen en natuurvergunningen weer op gang te brengen.

Het is niet precies duidelijk wat boeren in de zones te wachten staat. Dat werkt het kabinet de komende maanden nog uit.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Stikstofminister Jaimi van Essen (D66) hoopt nog steeds op steun van ongeveer 100 van de 150 zetels in de Tweede Kamer voor zijn stikstofplannen. Eerder sprak premier Rob Jetten ook al die hoop uit. Toch bleken de verschillende opvattingen in de Kamer groot en lijkt brede steun nu nog ver weg.

PRO heeft al toegezegd het pakket te steunen, mits het niet wordt afgezwakt. JA21, ook nadrukkelijk in beeld voor steun, zet juist "grote vraagtekens" bij het pakket in de huidige vorm. Kamerlid Maarten Goudzwaard vindt onder meer de bufferzones van een kilometer te groot en heeft bezwaren tegen een norm voor een maximum aan koeien per hectare weiland.

Met steun van PRO heeft de minderheidscoalitie van D66, VVD en CDA in totaal 86 Tweede Kamerzetels. In de senaat komt deze combinatie twee zetels tekort, maar die kunnen mogelijk van Volt (2), de Partij voor de Dieren (2) of de SP (3) komen.

De 'route over rechts' lijkt lastiger. In de Tweede Kamer levert steun van JA21 75 zetels op, met waarschijnlijk genoeg andere rechtse partijen die een plan aan een meerderheid kunnen helpen. Maar in de senaat, waar de coalitie maar 22 zetels heeft, lijkt een meerderheid over rechts verder uit zicht.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn woensdag met verliezen gesloten. Beleggers hadden onder meer aandacht voor de toespraak van de nieuwe voorzitter van de Federal Reserve in Portugal. Het was de eerste keer dat Kevin Warsh als Fed-voorzitter buiten de Verenigde Staten in het openbaar sprak.

Warsh bezocht woensdag het forum van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB). Tijdens zijn toespraak zei hij dat de inflatierisico's in de afgelopen weken zijn afgenomen. Ook verklaarde hij dat hij zal blijven vasthouden aan de inflatiedoelstelling van 2 procent van de Amerikaanse centrale bank. Verder benadrukte Warsh opnieuw dat de Fed gaat zorgen voor prijsstabiliteit in de VS.

De Dow-Jonesindex sloot nipt lager op 52.305,24 punten. De brede S&P 500-index daalde 0,2 procent naar 7483,23 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq eindigde 0,7 procent lager op 26.040,03 punten. Dinsdag sloten de beurzen nog tot 1,5 procent hoger.

Amazon

Meta Platforms won 8,8 procent. Ingewijden zeiden tegen persbureau Bloomberg dat het bedrijf achter Facebook en Instagram werkt aan plannen voor een cloudbedrijf dat toegang gaat verkopen tot AI-rekenkracht en AI-modellen. Daarmee kan het concern op een nieuw front concurreren met marktleiders als Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure en Google Cloud.

Nike kreeg er 4,9 procent bij en herstelde daarmee van zijn openingsverlies. De sportkledingfabrikant maakte dinsdag bekend in het afgelopen kwartaal meer omzet en winst te hebben geboekt dan analisten hadden verwacht. De verkopen op de belangrijke Chinese markt vielen wel opnieuw tegen.

Chevrolet

General Motors (GM) daalde 2 procent. De autofabrikant achter merken als Chevrolet en Cadillac meldde dat de verkopen in de VS in het tweede kwartaal zijn gedaald vergeleken met een jaar geleden. Dat kwam grotendeels door het stopzetten van bepaalde modellen.

Shutterstock verloor 29 procent, na het afblazen van de geplande fusie van het digitalebeeldenbedrijf met branchegenoot Getty Images door bezwaren van de Britse toezichthouder.

Banengroei Amerikaanse bedrijfsleven

Loonstrookverwerker ADP kwam woensdag met cijfers over de banengroei in het Amerikaanse bedrijfsleven. Die groei viel in juni zwakker uit dan verwacht.

Verder kijken beleggers uit naar het belangrijke banenrapport van de Amerikaanse overheid. Dat verschijnt donderdag omdat Wall Street vrijdag dichtblijft vanwege de viering van Onafhankelijkheidsdag op 4 juli.

ANTWERPEN (ANP) - Streamingdienst Videoland heeft de sportrechten en programmering van Viaplay Nederland verworven. Dat heeft DPG Media, de eigenaar van Videoland, woensdag gemeld. De overname is onder voorbehoud van goedkeuring van de Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) en de Ondernemingsraad (OR). Met de uitbreiding van de portefeuille van Videoland is een bedrag van 142 miljoen euro gemoeid.

Door het verwerven van de Viaplayrechten zijn op Videoland in de toekomst live topsport zoals de Formule 1, voetbal uit de Britse Premier League en internationale dartswedstrijden te zien. DPG Media noemt de uitbreiding van de programmering van Videoland met live sport "een langgekoesterde wens". Topman Jørgen Madsen Lindemann van Viaplay Group laat woensdag in een verklaring weten dat de verkoop in lijn is met de strategie van Viaplay om zich te focussen op de Scandinavische markt.

Bij Viaplay Nederland werken momenteel circa vijftig medewerkers, zij zullen overgaan naar DPG Media. Voor de Nederlandse Viaplay-abonnees verandert er vooralsnog niets. "Zij behouden gewoon toegang tot hun huidige abonnement en de vertrouwde app", aldus een woordvoerder van DPG Media. "Pas als de overname afgerond is, worden de sportrechten- en programmering van Viaplay zorgvuldig geïntegreerd binnen Videoland."

Ook voor abonnees van Videoland verandert er vooralsnog dus niets. De woordvoerder kan niet zeggen of de nieuwe toevoeging aan de Videoland-catalogus een gevolg gaat hebben voor de abonnementsprijzen van de streamingdienst.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: New PlayStation games will no longer be released on discs from January 2028, the gaming giant has announced. Sony said in a blog post new games would still be able to be bought in shops, but they would come with a digital code. It comes just days after Rockstar announced the hotly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI would similarly launch without a physical disc.

It marks a significant moment for the gaming industry, which has in recent years begun to rely more and more on digital distribution. Sony said the move came "as consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital." "This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs," it added. [...] PlayStation said the move would have no impact on games which are already released, or would be released before January 2028.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Erling Haaland “brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport”. And: “Haaland can call to mind a shark circling dark waters.”

We start this week with Joseph’s story about the Tokenpocalypse, which is companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after providers started charging per AI token. After the break, Joseph and Emanuel tell us about the ways companies are trying to do this, including using a tool to make their LLMs talk like cavemen. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains how entirely fake AI-generated flowers are all over eBay, Etsy, and Amazon.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI⁠
• ⁠Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop⁠
• ⁠AI’s Soaring Costs⁠⁠Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist⁠

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool: